FROM 1600 TO 1607

The second attempt to plant a French colony in the New World was more disastrous than the first.

Though my Lord Roberval fails, the French fishing vessels continue to bound over the billows of the Atlantic to the New World. By 1578 there are a hundred and fifty French fishing vessels off Newfoundland alone. The fishing folk engage in barter. Cartier’s heirs ask for a monopoly of the fur trade in Canada, but the grant is so furiously opposed by the merchants of the coast towns that it is revoked until the Marquis de la Roche, who had been a page at the French court, again obtains monopoly, with many high-sounding titles as Governor, and the added obligation that he must colonize the new land. What with wars and court intrigue, it is 1598 before the Governor of Canada is ready to sail. Of his two hundred people taken from jails, all but sixty have obtained their freedom by paying a ransom. With these sixty La Roche follows the fishing fleet out to the Grand Banks, then rounds southwestward for milder clime, where he may winter his people.

Straight across the ship’s course lies the famous sand bank, the graveyard of the Atlantic, what the old navigators called “the dreadful isle,” Sable Island. The sea lies placid as glass between the crescent horns of the long, low reefs, thirty miles from horn to horn, with never a tree to break the swale of the grass waist-high.

The marquis lands his sixty colonists to fish for supplies, while he goes on with the crew to find place for settlement.

Barely has the topsail dipped over the watery sky before breakers begin to thunder on the sand reefs. Air and earth lash to fury. Sails are torn from the ship of the marquis. His masts go overboard, and the vessel is driven, helpless as a chip in a maelstrom, clear back to the ports of France. Here double misfortune awaits La Roche. His old patrons of the court are no longer powerful. He is thrown in prison by a rival baron.

In vain the colonists strain tired eyes for a sail at sea. Days become weeks, weeks months, summer autumn; and no boat came back. As winter gales assailed the sea, sending the sand drifting like spray, the convicts built themselves huts out of driftwood, and scooped beds for themselves in the earth like rabbit burrows. Of food there was plenty. The people had their fishing lines; and the stock, left by the Baron de Lery long ago, had multiplied and now overran the island. Wild fowl, too, teemed on the inland lake; and foxes, which must have drifted ashore on the ice float of spring, ran wild through the sedge.

Like Robinson Crusoe cast on a desert isle, the desperate people fought their fate. Traps were set for the foxes, snares for the birds, and scouts kept tramping from end to end of the island for sight of a sail. Racked with despair and anxiety, these outcasts of civilization soon fell to bitter quarreling. Traps were found rifled. Dead men lay beside the looted traps; and, doubtless, not a few men lost their lives in spring when the ice floes drifted down with the seal herds, and the men gave mad chase from ice pan to ice pan for seal pelts to make clothing. Spring wore to summer. The graves on the sand banks increased. For a second winter the dreary snowfall wrapped the island in a mantle white as death sheet. Then came the same weary monotony, the frenzied seal hunt over the blood-stained floes; the long summer days with the drone of the tide on the sand banks; the men mad with hope at sight of a sail peak over the far wave tops, only to be plunged in despair as the fisher boat passed too far for signal; the fading of the grasses to russet in the sad autumn light; then snowfall again and despair.

Five years passed before La Roche could aid his people; and the pilot who went to their rescue won himself immortal contempt by robbing the castaways of their furs. Word of the rescue came to the ears of the court. Royalty commanded the refugees brought before the throne. Only twelve had survived, and these marched before the royal presence clothed in the skins of seals, hair unkempt, beards to mid-waist, “like river gods of yore,” says the old record. The King was so touched that he commanded fifty crowns given to each man and the stolen furs restored. La Roche died of chagrin.

While France is trying to colonize Canada, England has not forgotten that John Cabot first coasted these northern shores and erected the English flag.

About the time that Marguerite Roberval was left alone on Isle Demons, two boys half-brothers were playing on the sands of the English Channel, sailing toy boats and listening to sailor yarns of loot on the Spanish Main. One was Humphrey Gilbert; the other, Walter Raleigh. These two were destined to lead England’s first colonies to America.

Martin Frobisher had already poked the prows of English ships into the icy straits of Greenland waters, seeking way to China. He had come out with a fleet of fifteen sails and one hundred mariners in 1578 to found colonies, but was led away by the lure of “fool’s gold.” Loading his vessels with worthless rocks which he believed contained gold enough “to suffice all the gold gluttons of the world,” he sailed back to England without leaving the trace of a colony. Francis Drake, the very same year, had for the first time plowed an English furrow around the seas of the world, chasing Spanish treasure boats up the west coast of South America and loading his own vessel with loot to the water line. Afraid to go back the way he had come, round South America, where all the Spanish frigates lay in wait to catch him, Drake pushed on up the west coast as far as California, and landing, took possession of what he called “New Albion” for Queen Elizabeth. But still no colony had been planted for England.

Gilbert and Raleigh, the two half-brothers, were both zealous for glory. Both stood high in court favor. Both had fought for Queen Elizabeth in the wars. Gilbert had fame as seaman and geographer. He asks for the privilege of founding England’s first colony. The Queen will incur no expense. Gilbert and Raleigh and their friends will fit out the vessels. Elizabeth deeds to Gilbert all that old domain discovered by John Cabot, reserving only one fifth of the minerals he may find; and she sends him a present of a golden anchor as a Godspeed. June 11, 1583, Sir Humphrey sets sail with a fleet of three splendid merchantmen, fitted out as men-of-war, and two heavily armed little frigates. The crews number three hundred and sixty men, but they are for the most part impressed seamen and riotous. The fleet is only well away when the biggest of the merchantmen signals that plague has broken out, and flees back to England. Later, as fog hides the boats from one another, the pirate crew on board the little frigate Swallow run down an English fisherman on the Grand Banks, board her, and at bayonet point loot the schooner from stem to stern. When the ships lower sail to come in on the tide through the long Narrows, to the rock-girt harbor of St. John’s, Newfoundland, the hundreds of fishing vessels lying at anchor there object to the pirate Swallow; but Sir Humphrey reads his commission from the Queen, and the fishing fleet roars a welcome that sets the rocks ringing. Sunday, August 4, the next day after entering, Biscayans and French and Portuguese and English send their new Governor tribute in provisions, fish from the English, marmalade and wines and spices from the foreigners. The admiral gives a feast to the master mariners each week he is in port, and entertains as the old record says “right bountifully.” Wandering round the rocky harbor, up the high cliff to the left where remnants of an old fortress may be seen to-day, along the circular hills to the right where the fishing stages cover the water front, Gilbert’s men find “fool’s gold,” rock with specks of iron and mica. Daniel, the refiner of metals, declares it is a rich specimen of silver. The find goes to Sir Humphrey’s head. He sees himself a second Francis Drake, ships crammed with gold. When the captains of the other vessels in his fleet would see the treasure, he answers: “Content yourselves! It is enough! I have seen it but I would have no speech made of it in harbor; for the Portuguese and Biscayans and French might learn of it. We shall soon return hither again.”

Many of the men are in ill health. Gilbert decides to send the invalids home in the Swallow; but he transfers the bold pirate crew of that frigate to the big ship Delight, which carries provisions for the colony. While planning to make St. John’s the headquarters of his new kingdom, Sir Humphrey wishes to explore those regions where Cartier had gone and whence the fishing schooners bring such wealth in furs.

August 20 the remainder of his fleet rounds out of St. John’s south west for the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Delight with the provisions, the Golden Hinde with the majority of the people, the little frigate Squirrel weighted down by artillery stores but under command of Gilbert himself, because the smaller ship can run close ashore to explore. To keep up the spirits of the men, there is much merrymaking. Becalmed off Cape Breton, Sir Humphrey visits the big ship Delight, where the trumpets and the drums and the pipes and the cornets reel off wild sailor jigs. “There was,” says the old record, “little watching for danger.” Wednesday, August 26, the sounding line forewarned the reefs of Sable Island. Breakers were sighted. The Delight signaled that her captain wanted to shift southwest to deeper water, but Gilbert wanted to enter the St. Lawrence and signaled back to go on northwest. That night a storm raged. The provision ship ran full tilt into the sand banks of Sable Island, and was battered into chips before the other ships could come to rescue. All supplies were lost and all the pirate crew perished but sixteen, who jumped into the pinnace dragging astern, and, with only one oar, half punted, half drifted for seven days till the wave wash carried them to the shores of Newfoundland. There they were picked up by a fishing vessel.

With provisions gone, Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s colony was doomed. He must turn back. Saturday, August 31, they reversed the course. When halfway across the Atlantic the admiral rowed from the little Squirrel across to the Golden Hinde to have a lame foot treated by the surgeon. “Cheer up,” he urged the men. “Next year her Majesty will loan me 1000 pounds, and we shall come again.”

As storm was gathering, the men begged him to remain on the larger ship, but Gilbert refused to leave the sailors of the Squirrel. The frigate was as safe for him as for them, he said. Some one called his attention to the fact that the frigate was overweighted with cannon. Gilbert laughed all danger to scorn. Soon afterwards the waves began to break short and high a dangerous sea for a small, overweighted ship. It had been arranged that both ships should swing lanterns fore and aft to keep each other in sight at night. On the night of September 9 a phosphorescent light was seen to gleam above the mainmast of the Squirrel, certain sign to the superstitious sailors of dire disaster; but when the Hinde slackened speed, and the great waves threw the vessels almost together, there was Sir Humphrey sitting aloft, book in hand, shouting out, “We are as near Heaven by sea as by land.” The Hinde fell to the rear. The Squirrel led away, her stern lanterns lighting a trail across the shiny dark of the tempestuous billows. Suddenly, at midnight, the guiding light was lost. The Squirrel’s stern lanterns were seen to descend the pitching trough of a mountain wave, and when the wall of water fell, no light came up. Down into the abyss the little craft had plunged, never to rise again, carrying explorer, treasure hunters, colonists, to a watery grave.

It may be added that the disaster took place halfway across the ocean, and not off Newfoundland, as the ballad relates.

But for all this misfortune, England did not desist. The very next year Raleigh, who had played on the sands with Humphrey Gilbert, sends out his colonists to the Roanoke, and lays the foundations for the beginning of empire in the Southern States. English sailors explore Cape Cod. Ten years after Frobisher had brought home his cargo of worthless stones from Labrador, Davis, the master mariner, is out exploring the waters west of Greenland; and Henry Hudson, the English pilot who had discovered Hudson River, New York, for the Dutch, is retained by the English in 1610 to explore those waters west of Greenland where both Frobisher and Davis reported open passage.

It is midsummer of 1610 when Hudson enters Hudson Straits. The ice jam of Ungava Bay, Labrador, has almost torn his ships’ timbers apart and has set fear shivering like an aspen leaf among the crew. Old Juett, the mate, rages openly at Hudson for venturing such a frail ship on such a sea; but when the ship anchors at the west end of Hudson Straits, five hundred miles from the Atlantic, there opens to view another sea, a sea large as the Mediterranean, that, like the Mediterranean, may lead to another world. It is as dangerous to go back as forward; and forward Hudson sails, southwestward for that sea Drake had cruised off California, the old mate’s mutiny rumbling beneath decks like a volcano. South, southwestward, seven hundred miles sails Hudson, past the high rocks and airy cataracts of Richmond Gulf, past silence like the realms of death, on down where Hudson Bay rounds into James Bay and the shallows plainly show this is no way to a western sea, but a blind inlet, bowlder-strewn and muddy as swamps.

When the ship runs aground and all hands must out to waist in ice water to pull her ashore as the tide comes in, Juett’s rage bursts all bounds. As they toil, snow begins to fall. They are winter bound and storm bound in an unknown land. Half the crew are in open mutiny; the other half build winter quarters and range the woods of James Bay for game. Of game there is plenty, but the rebels refuse to hunt. A worthless lad named Green, whom Hudson had picked off the streets of London, turns traitor and talebearer, fomenting open quarrels till the commander threatens he will hang to the yardarm the first man guilty of disobedience. So passes the sullen winter. Provisions are short when the ship weighs anchor for England in June of 1611. With tears in his eyes, Hudson hands out the last rations. Ice blocks the way. Delay means starvation. If the crew were only half as large, Henry Green whispers to the mutineers, there would be food enough for passage home. The ice floes clear, the sails swing rattling to the breeze, but as Hudson steps on deck, the mutineers leap upon him like wolves. He is bound and thrown into the rowboat. With him are thrust his son and eight others of the crew. The rope is cut, the rowboat jerks back adrift, and Hudson’s vessel, manned by mutineers, drives before the wind. A few miles out, the mutineers lower sails to rummage for food. The little boat with the castaways is seen coming in pursuit. Guilt-haunted, the crew out with all sails and flee as from avenging ghosts. So passes Henry Hudson from the ken of all men, though Indian legend on the shores of Hudson Bay to this day maintains that the castaways landed north of Rupert and lived among the savages.

Not less disastrous were English efforts than French to colonize the New World. Up to 1610 Canada’s story is, in the main, a record of blind heroism, dogged courage, death that refused to acknowledge defeat.

Four hundred French vessels now yearly come to reap the harvest of the sea; in and out among the fantastic rocks of Gaspe, pierced and pillared and scooped into caves by the wave wash, where fisher boats reap other kind of harvest, richer than the silver harvest of the sea, harvest of beaver, and otter, and marten; up the dim amber waters of the Saguenay, within the shadow of the somber gorge, trafficking baubles of bead and red print for furs, precious furs. Pontgrave, merchant prince, comes out with fifty men in 1600, and leaves sixteen at Tadoussac, ostensibly as colonists, really as wood lopers to scatter through the forests and learn the haunts of the Indians. Pontgrave comes back for men and furs in 1601, and comes again in 1603 with two vessels, accompanied by a soldier of fortune from the French court, who acts as geographer, Samuel Champlain, now in his thirty-sixth year, with service in war to his credit and a journey across Spanish America.

When Champlain returns to France the King readily grants to Sieur de Monts a region roughly defined as anywhere between Pennsylvania and Labrador, designated Acadia. This region Sieur de Monts is to colonize in return for a monopoly of the fur trade. When other traders complain, De Monts quiets them by letting them all buy shares in the venture. With him are associated as motley a throng of treasure seekers as ever stampeded for gold. There is Samuel Champlain, the court geographer; there is Pontgrave, the merchant prince, on a separate vessel with stores for the colonists. Pontgrave is to attend especially to the fur trading. There are the Baron de Poutrincourt and his young son, Biencourt, and other noblemen looking for broader domains in the New World; and there are the usual riffraff of convicts taken from dungeons. Priests go to look after the souls of the Catholics, Huguenot ministers to care for the Protestants, and so valiantly do these dispute with tongues and fists that the sailors threaten to bury them in the same grave to see if they can lie at peace in death.

Before the boats sight Acadia, it is early summer of 1604. Pontgrave leaves stores with De Monts and sails on up to Tadoussac. De Monts enters the little bay of St. Mary’s, off the northwest corner of Nova Scotia, and sends his people ashore to explore.

Signs of minerals they seek, rushing pellmell through the woods, gleeful as boys out of school. The forest is pathless and dense with June undergrowth, shutting out the sun and all sign of direction. The company scatters. Priest Aubry, more used to the cobble pavement of Paris than to the tangle of ferns, grows fatigued and drinks at a fresh-water rill. Going in the direction of his comrades’ voices, he suddenly realizes that he has left his sword at the spring. The priest hurries back for the sword, loses his companions’ voices, and when he would return, finds that he is hopelessly lost. The last shafts of sunlight disappear. The chill of night settles on the darkening woods. The priest shouts till he is hoarse and fires off his pistol; but the woods muffle all sound but the scream of the wild cat or the uncanny hoot of the screech owl. Aubry wanders desperately on and on in the dark, his cassock torn to tatters by the brushwood, his way blocked by the undisturbed windfall of countless ages, . . . on and on, . . . till gray dawn steals through the forest and midday wears to a second night.

Back at the boat were wild alarm and wilder suspicions. Could the Huguenots, with whom Aubry had battled so violently, have murdered him? De Monts scouted the notion as unworthy, but the suspicion clung in spite of fiercest denials. All night cannon were fired from the vessel and bonfires kept blazing on shore; but two or three days passed, and the priest did not come.

De Monts then sails on up the Bay of Fundy, which he calls French Bay, and by the merest chance sheers through an opening eight hundred feet wide to the right and finds himself in the beautiful lakelike Basin of Annapolis, broad chough to harbor all the French navy, with a shore line of wooded meadows like home-land parks. Poutrincourt is so delighted, he at once asks for an estate here and names the domain Port Royal.

On up Fundy Bay sails De Monts, Samuel Champlain ever leaning over decks, making those maps and drawings which have come down from that early voyage. The tides carry to a broad river on the north side. It is St. John’s Day. They call the river St. John, and wander ashore, looking vainly for more minerals. Westward is another river, known to-day as the Ste. Croix, the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick. Dochet Island at its mouth seems to offer what to a soldier is an ideal site. A fort here could command either Fundy Bay or the upland country, which Indians say leads back to the St. Lawrence. Thinking more of fort than farms, De Monts plants his colony on Ste. Croix River, on an island composed mainly of sand and rock.

While workmen labor to erect a fort on the north side, the pilot is sent back to Nova Scotia to prospect for minerals. As the vessel coasts near St. Mary’s Bay, a black object is seen moving weakly along the shore. Sailors and pilot gaze in amazement. A hat on the end of a pole is waved weakly from the beach. The men can scarcely believe their senses. It must be the priest, though sixteen days have passed since he disappeared. For two weeks Aubry had wandered, living on berries and roots, before he found his way back to the sea.

Here, then, at last, is founded the first colony in Canada, a little palisaded fort of seventy-nine men straining longing eyes at the sails of the vessel gliding out to sea; for Pontgrave has taken one vessel up the St. Lawrence to trade, and Poutrincourt has gone back to France with the other for supplies. A worse beginning could hardly have been made. The island was little better than a sand heap. No hills shut out the cold winds that swept down the river bed from the north, and the tide carried in ice jam from the south. As the snow began to fall, padding the stately forests with a silence as of death, whitening the gaunt spruce trees somber as funereal mourners, the colonists felt the icy loneliness of winter in a forest chill their hearts. Cooped up on the island by the ice, they did little hunting. Idleness gives time for repinings. Scurvy came, and before spring half the colonists had peopled the little cemetery outside the palisades. De Monts has had enough of Ste. Croix. When Pontgrave comes out with forty more men in June, De Monts prepares to move. Champlain had the preceding autumn sailed south seeking a better site; and now with De Monts he sails south again far as Cape Cod, looking for a place to plant the capital of New France. It is amusing to speculate that Canada might have included as far south as Boston, if they had found a harbor to their liking; but they saw nothing to compare with Annapolis Basin, narrow of entrance, landlocked, placid as a lake, with shores wooded like a park; and back they cruised to Ste. Croix in August, to move the colony across to Nova Scotia, to Annapolis Basin of Acadia. While Champlain and Pontgrave volunteer to winter in the wilderness, De Monts goes home to look after his monopoly in France.

What had De Monts to show for his two years’ labor? His company had spent what would be $20,000 in modern money, and all returns from fur trade had been swallowed up prolonging the colony. While Champlain hunted moose in the woods round Port Royal and Pontgrave bartered furs during the winter of 1605-1606, De Monts and Poutrincourt and the gay lawyer Marc Lescarbot fight for the life of the monopoly in Paris and point out to the clamorous merchants that the building of a French empire in the New World is of more importance than paltry profits. De Monts remains in France to stem the tide rising against him, while Poutrincourt and Lescarbot sail on the Jonas with more colonists and supplies for Port Royal.

Noon, July 27, 1606, the ship slips into the Basin of Annapolis. To Lescarbot, the poet lawyer, the scene is a fairyland the silver flood of the harbor motionless as glass, the wooded meadows dank with bloom, the air odorous of woodland smells, the blue hills rimming round the sky, and against the woods of the north shore the chapel spire and thatch roofs and slab walls of the little fort, the one oasis of life in a wilderness. As the sails rattled down and the anchor dropped, not a soul appeared from the fort. The gates were bolted fast. The Jonas runs up the French ensign. Then a canoe shoots out from the brushwood, paddled by the old chief Membertou. He signals back to the watchers behind the gates. Musketry shots ring out welcome. The ship’s cannon answer, setting the waters churning. Trumpets blare. The gates fly wide and out marches the garrison two lone Frenchmen. The rest, despairing of a ship that summer, have cruised along to Cape Breton to obtain supplies from French fishermen, whence, presently, come Pontgrave and Champlain, overjoyed to find the ship from France. Poutrincourt has a hogshead of wine rolled to the courtyard and all hands fitly celebrate.

When Pontgrave carries the furs to France, Marc Lescarbot, the lawyer poet, proves the life of the fort for this, the third winter of the colonists in Acadia. Poutrincourt and his son attend to trade. Champlain, as usual, commands; and dull care is chased away by a thousand pranks of the Paris advocate. First, he sets the whole fort a-gardening, and Baron Poutrincourt forgets his noblesse long enough to wield the hoe. Then Champlain must dam up the brook for a trout pond. The weather is almost mild as summer until January. The woods ring to many a merry picnic, fishing excursion, or moose hunt; and when snow comes, the gay Lescarbot along with Champlain institutes a New World order of nobility the Order of Good Times. Each day one of the number must cater to the messroom table of the fort. This means keen hunting, keen rivalry for one to outdo another in the giving of sumptuous feasts. And all is done with the pomp and ceremony of a court banquet. When the chapel bell rings out noon hour and workers file to the long table, there stands the Master of the Revels, napkin on shoulder, chain of honor round his neck, truncheon in his hand. The gavel strikes, and there enter the Brotherhood, each bearing a steaming dish in his hand, moose hump, beaver tail, bears’ paws, wild fowl smelling luscious as food smells only to out-of-doors men. Old Chief Membertou dines with the whites. Crouching round the wall behind the benches are the squaws and the children, to whom are flung many a tasty bit.

At night time, round the hearth fire, when the roaring logs set the shadows dancing on the rough-timbered floor, the truncheon and chain of command are pompously transferred to the new Grand Master. It is all child’s play, but it keeps the blood of grown men coursing hopefully.

Or else Lescarbot perpetrates a newspaper, a handwritten sheet giving the doings of the day, perhaps in doggerel verse of his own composing. At other times trumpets and drums and pipes keep time to a dance. As all the warring clergymen, both Huguenot and Catholic, have died of scurvy, Lescarbot acts as priest on Sundays, and winds up the day with cheerful excursions up the river, or supper spread on the green. The lawyer’s good spirits proved contagious. The French songs that rang through the woods of Acadia, keeping time to the chopper’s labors, were the best antidote to scurvy; but the wildwood happiness was too good to last. While L’Escarbot was writing his history of the new colonies a bolt fell from the blue. Instead of De Monts’ vessel there came in spring a fishing smack with word that the grant of Acadia had been rescinded. No more money would be advanced. Poutrincourt and his son, Biencourt, resolved to come back without the support of a company; but for the present all took sad leave of the little settlement Poutrincourt, Champlain, L’Escarbot and sailed with the Cape Breton fishing fleet for France, where they landed in October, 1607.

Cartier, Roberval, La Roche, De Monts all had failed to establish France in Canada; and as for England, Sir Humphrey’s colonists lay bleaching skeletons at the bottom of the sea.